The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  Robbie placed a bottle of brandy on the table for his officers, and each man produced his cup. They poured and drank reflectively as Robbie reminded them briefly of Jemmy Campbell’s astonishment that the Perjurer was at liberty. Ralph noticed again that, though Robbie was tenuously stuck at the very periphery of the universe, he played the politician and flourished documents and letters as if he were striving at the very heart of things. He read through Jemmy’s letters to Davy Collins on the subject, and then he read Davy’s reply. Through this Jemmy could be heard snorting and heaving a fierce sigh now and then—like an accent to this or that sentence of Davy’s. Davy had suggested that if Jemmy wanted to prosecute the girl before the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction, he was welcome to. Robbie and Jemmy chose typically to be outraged at this idea. It was not their function as individual officers to enforce the eternal edict against perjury. It was the court’s, and the court was refusing.

  When the court continued in its refusal to prosecute Turner the Perjurer, Jemmy Campbell had written to Davy and told him he would never serve on the court again. H.E. had been oppressive—Robbie used the word twice—in trying to force Jemmy back to serve on a court which wilfully overlooked its own required duty and which heard what its members said, and then let their judgements be ignored, their good time consumed, their reasonable expectations violated.

  “And I’ll tell you what Jemmy said to yon quizzical man whose power here is vaster than that of a Russian tsar, and who knows and relishes that power. Jemmy declared to him that all you honest lads were taken by surprise when the Letters Patent were read that day when the she-lags were landed and you discovered you were to serve this crackpot court. That we didn’t know till we had landed on this awesome soil seemed to come as a wee surprise to the man. Oh, he says, your officers all feel offended by their lack of foreknowledge? They take a lot of opportunities to tell me so, I inform him. Then, he says, I want you to put it to them. First whether they look upon sitting at the criminal court as a military duty, or as an unexpected extra duty in compliance with the Letters Patent. And second, whether they had any knowledge of having to serve on the court before their landing.”

  Robbie inhaled significantly. “Now you see Jemmy’s position. He has made a stand for all of us, a stand properly based on our liberties, our sensibility, and our proper self-respect. I look to you to align yourself with his stand. I look to you not to leave him stranded but to refuse to sit any further on the same bench as that pretty scribbler.” (He meant, as everyone knew, Davy Collins.)

  Ralph was pleased to see Watkin hold up a languid hand. “So it is a wider question than just the matter of the girl?”

  “The girl is a minor section of the entire proposition, Captain Tench. But if we stand fast and all refuse to sit, that judicial posturer will be forced to prosecute the girl, as he should have in any case.”

  “Oh, I understand,” said Watkin, blinking. “You want on one hand to demolish the court because we did not know of it before we landed. And on the other to have it hang Nancy Turner.”

  Robbie’s eyes, the whites flecked with hard little lumps of granite colour, the work of his irreconcilable spleen, ignored this and passed over his officers, fixing for a time on Ralph. Ralph looked ahead and worked his chin into his uniform collar. Let him ask the question, Ralph prayed, of those of private wealth and of such talent as cannot be ignored.

  Happily, and in spite of the earlier remarks, Robbie had asked Watkin Tench first, knowing that if he had Watkin he had the rest. Tench was the son of the proprietor of a boarding school in Chester. Once he had been a prisoner of the Americans for three months when his ship was driven ashore in Maryland, but Ralph was grateful to the Americans that they had released him. For this present legalistic emergency at the limit of space, in that adjustment of the Americas known as New South Wales, could not have been imagined without him, without his decisiveness, exactness, his correctness of language. He had the wondrous courage, too, to stand up to a mad commander.

  “Major Ross,” he began, “previous to my arrival in this country I had no knowledge of the Act of Parliament which would require me to sit on the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction. But then His Excellency kindly proffered me a copy of the act and I read it.”

  This outshone everyone, because no one else among them had read it, no one else had been so careful—not even those like Jemmy who had taken up disgruntlement as a profession.

  “From the moment I read it,” Watkin persisted, “I looked upon it as my duty to sit on criminal courts whenever ordered, and I still look upon it as such.”

  “Do you realise, my little scribe, Watkin,” screamed Robbie, “that such an opinion will lead to the liberation of the Perjurer?”

  “That is Davy Collins’s concern,” said Watkin, closing his eyes. “He is judge and prosecutor. I—thank God—am not.”

  Robbie made a subtle but terrible noise, involving both the nose and the throat. He feared he had lost, so all the more vigorously did he challenge George Johnston, the young officer who enjoyed an attachment not only to a she-lag, but to Esther Abrahams, who was a Jewess as well. He hoped George would be somehow shamed by his attachment to his convict concubine to come in on Jemmy’s side. But Watkin had saved them all, and George stuck with Watkin. The astronomer Lieutenant Dawes also kept faith with Watkin and Davy Collins, since they were not only men of science, but as well men not governed by animus. And by the time Robbie asked Ralph, it was safe for Ralph to fall in with the others and to give his true opinion, one at which Robbie grimaced.

  “Return then, gentlemen,” Robbie declaimed at the end of the voting, “to your whores and your plays. But you might remember that your promotion lies in my hands.”

  The officers left Robbie’s house like dismissed schoolchildren, yet glowing with their purpose to discommode the schoolteacher. They would happily oppose H.E. on many grounds, his demands on them to be garrison, court, guards. If only Robbie himself was not so odious.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Autopsy

  NOVEMBER 1788

  Throughout the first year of the settlement’s existence, Provost Marshal Harry Brewer was often presented with matters to do with his rival Private Handy Baker. So also—either through duty or through friendship—was Ralph Clark.

  In the first November, as an example, a private named Bullmore was beaten to death in a squabble over one of the she-lags. Captain Shea would normally have been the officer to go to the hospital to attend the autopsy, but he was ill with the consumption which would later finish him, and Ralph was sent instead.

  November was teaching the lagtown how sweet a spring evening could be here. Stars excited the vision. A southerly breeze idly rinsed Lieutenant Clark in sweet, astringent air. Surgeon Johnny White, the tooth-puller Considen, and Harry Brewer the Provost Marshal were all waiting for Ralph in a small room at the hospital. Lanterns were hoisted on all four walls. Thomas Bullmore’s naked body, cruelly bruised about the head and ribs, lay on a solid cedar table. The table had a deftly tilted surface, and a drain hole drilled through one corner. Beneath the hole stood a bucket. By these signs, and by the leather aprons Johnny White and Dennis Considen were wearing, Ralph would have known if he did not already that the surgeons were about to inquire into Bullmore’s remains.

  Charming Surgeon White was an exacting physician, fine featured, black haired, an exceptional water colourist. He was especially good at rendering the native birds. He travelled avidly and always made friends ashore. At the time the convict fleet had been in Rio, he’d gone into town, won over a local surgeon, and—in front of a crowd of Brazilian physicians—given a highly applauded demonstration of Allinson’s new method of amputation on the crushed leg of a Portuguese private soldier.

  Ralph remembered too that during that Rio stay, when he himself had been afflicted with homesickness and dreams and the loss of Betsey Alicia—when he had only a dull interest in the quirkiness of Latin life ashore, and a poor tolerance of the ceremonial excesses t
hat accompanied the bearing of the Papist Eucharist from the cathedral to the houses of the influential sick—Johnny White had landed for days at a time. He had struck up an acquaintance with some of the beautiful young novices at the Convento de Sao Juda. He would stand at the convent grille and trade his English for their Portuguese by the hour. They were beautiful girls of distinguished families. Soon they would make a decision either to become nuns or to go into what was known as the world and marry. But it had not been the marrying ones who fascinated Johnny White. For by the time they finally made their choice he would be beyond the reach of any European woman other than the women in the convict hold. But the idea that some of these sublime girls might become the brides of Christ seemed to fill him with a dolorous but enjoyable longing.

  Johnny White was therefore one of Ralph’s complete men, the way Davy Collins was complete. It was a shock to see him in a leather apron, holding the implements of butchery and standing so calmly over Bullmore’s body.

  “Private Baker did this, Ralph,” said the little Irish surgeon Considen. “You know? Handy Baker?”

  “Handy Baker and some associates,” murmured Harry Brewer for the sake of justice.

  Harry, as Ralph knew from Harry’s many recitals of the incident, had been beaten once by Private Baker. There had been a time when he came home to find Duckling missing, vanished across the stream to the hut of Goose, Duckling’s longtime abbess or madame, who had summoned her as of right.

  Crossing the stream to Goose’s hut, Harry had found Handy Baker with Duckling. Interrupted in full flow, the hulking soldier had beaten and bruised Harry fairly comprehensively.

  When Harry revived, Baker had already fled, but Goose the abbess sat a while with Harry and reasoned with him. She had after all known Duckling since Duckling was nine years old. Duckling and her mother had rented some sort of cellar in St. Giles from the abbess and her late husband, who together had conducted a pharmacy at ground level near the Red Fox in Greek Street. Nursing Harry with brandy, she had reminded him that if he came down heavy on Private Handy Baker, everyone would laugh at him.

  Goose had offered Harry some sort of arrangement, something to do with secure tenure of the girl, and Harry implied but never specified that they had come to some sort of grudging contract. Harry had threatened the woman, yet it was to her, and not to the Provost Marshal, that an ancient and obscure power seemed to attach.

  Ralph himself knew Goose. She was red haired, plump, genial, and about twenty-eight years of age. But she had a royal agelessness. He had a memory of having been to see her once himself. She had provided him for an hour with a tent and a girl. His memory of the contact both with the girl and the abbess was blurred by the liquor he’d drunk that evening and by subsequent shame. He remembered though that in his guilt and nervousness he had talked too much and specifically about the most sacred matters, including Betsey Alicia.

  Private Baker had now killed Private Bullmore, or so it seemed, and that might give joy to most rival lovers. Except Harry, who saw ghosts and had his nightmares about hanging.

  So, standing by the autopsy table, as that consummate surgeon Johnny White was about to let Bullmore’s quenched blood, Harry showed no joy at all. Wanly he and Ralph listened to the two surgeons taking calm bets on what it was that had finished Bullmore. Johnny suggested bleeding in the abdominal cavity as well as under the skull. Considen put his money outright on subdural bleeding.

  Johnny White said, “I intend to open the cranium, and although that will not be too horrific, I would understand if you wished to wait outside.”

  Yet both Ralph and Harry stayed—Ralph out of a sort of military pride, Harry perhaps from a desire to see Handy Baker’s malice made visible beneath Bullmore’s skull. Both laymen looked elsewhere while White moved Thomas Bullmore’s square shaven head, and with a scalpel cut a wide circle in the scalp. With an oblique vision, Ralph saw Dennis Considen pass his superior a bone saw. As the rasping began, Johnny White grew expansive about what had befallen Thomas Bullmore.

  It was a characteristic west-side-of-town story. Bullmore had wanted to sleep with Mary Phillips, a Somerset house breaker whose regular man, Private McDonald, was away up harbour at the outstation called Rosehill. When Bullmore got to Mary Phillips’s shack, though, he found he’d been beaten there by Handy Baker, who had met her earlier in the evening at the public cookhouse and who was already in her bed. Bullmore had raged around the hut, beating at the timbers, kicking the corner posts and the door, screaming that no cock would have his hen that night.

  At last Baker had come out fully dressed to fight him.

  There were other Marines in the women’s camp that night, some sitting on doorsteps. They agreed formally to second the two fighters. In this first fight, early in the evening, some damage had been done to Bullmore’s face, especially when he fell and knocked his jaw against the lintel of Mary Phillips’s next-door neighbour’s house.

  Bullmore had nonetheless come back sometime between four and five o’clock in the morning to disturb Baker and Phillips. This time Baker had apparently waged the fight unmercifully, and other young Marines—Nancy Turner’s lover Private Dukes and two of Baker’s standard followers, Privates Askey and Haines—had appeared. Seeing Bullmore’s blood they turned on the stunned and stumbling young Marine as on a pariah. After that, Bullmore had staggered up the hill, presented himself to Dennis Considen, and after much frenetic anxiety characteristic of a victim of concussion, fallen into a faint and died.

  It was believed, said Johnny, that at the height of the savagery Baker had tried to restrain Askey and Haines from crushing in Bullmore’s rib cage with their boots.

  “His arguments for peace might well help him in court,” murmured Johnny White, laying the saw aside. Having cut a clean inverted dish of bone off the top of Bullmore’s cranium, he removed that shield to expose what he called the dura mater, which he now began to probe with scissors. Harry and Ralph moved their eyes to Bullmore’s head, which assistant surgeon Considen, having put his arms under poor Bullmore’s shoulders, had lifted toward the light. A glimpse was enough for them to fulfil their duty.

  Johnny began devising a report to Harry, in the hope that he himself would not be asked to waste his time in court. “You can say, Harry, that there is a quantity of extravasated blood under the skull and between the dura and pia mater on the occiput or hinder part of the head. This was caused by blows or a heavy fall and was on its own enough to kill the boy.” He shrugged. “So my friend the Irish tooth-puller here was right.”

  While Johnny White and Considen went on to examine Bullmore’s viscera, Harry and Ralph, their duty dispatched, went outside. Harry lit a yellowed clay pipe and sucked on it with a pained expression. Down the hill, in the civil prison, Baker, Haines, Dukes, and Askey slept in twenty-eight-pound ankle chains and under a gallows shadow. The idea, of course, gave Harry no joy.

  Again what took his attention was the great puzzle of criminal fearlessness. “When I go down to the lock-up,” said Harry, “Baker wants to speak to me. He complains that Haines has shat himself in the corner. Maybe you should choose friends with better habits, I reply. And then he says, You tell Ketch Freeman to leave the knot loose so I’ll dance plenty. You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you, you old scandal? The bastard asked me if I thought there wasn’t a Marine or a convict who would give up the chance of a turn in love lane with Duckling? He asked me, in front of his friends, did I think I was the only general of her lowlands?”

  Ralph wondered yet again at the completeness of Harry Brewer’s confessions. There was no vanity at all, no hedging of cruel fact. There could not be a doubt that this derived precisely from his having been for ten years the oldest midshipman in the Royal Navy, sharing the rank with sweet-faced twelve-year-olds, and saved only from the indignity of the midshipmen’s mess by his friendship and collaboration with the Captain. So that there was no humiliation inherent in the penal city which Harry could not countenance and report to a true friend.


  “See, Ralph, he—like all the other bastards—has this indecent lack of fear, which I cannot understand. If the wrongdoer does not fear the punishment, where’s the sense of any of it?”

  Harry did not want his troubles with Baker settled by the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction. They were not. Six days later Davy’s court found the Marines guilty not of murder but of manslaughter. Davy Collins and the others could not be sure it was Baker, or any other specific soldier, who inflicted on Bullmore that one fatal wound to the brain. Each of the participants in Bullmore’s destruction was sentenced to two hundred lashes. Though this was a moderate-to-severe penalty, it would not in any large way impede Private Baker as a lover or a bruiser. Yet the survival of his tormentor seemed to fill Harry with elation.

  CHAPTER 13

  Hanging the Marines

  MARCH AND APRIL 1789

  “I think a comedy,” H.E. had said, appointing Ralph manager and playmaster and leaning forward on his bandy legs, which the lags found comedic indeed. “But I do not want jokes about Jews, Mr. Clark.” H.E. then continued in that manner both penetrating and abstract, his eyes at once piercing and myopic. “They are the chosen race, and jokes at their expense come too cheaply to be of value.”

  H.E., said Harry Brewer, had a German Jewish father from Frankfurt, a Bread Street language teacher and dance instructor. The man had been H.E.’s mother’s second husband, but she had taught her son to pretend to be the offspring of her first, who was an officer in the Royal Navy, so that the boy could get into the Greenwich Naval School. Ralph could not tell whether H.E., in raising that proviso about Jews, was acknowledging his own Semitic connections or taking a rational British posture.